i'm sam sachs i'm in for tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture. wal-mart is the largest corporation in the world and its owners are worth more than one hundred billion dollars so how much longer can wal-mart get away with paying their workers jack well given recent labor actions not much longer more on this in just a moment also staggering new numbers out are revealing just how much the all guards

are spending in our elections and here's the bad news it's about to get a lot worse i'll explain a little bit later and slowly but surely america's prisons are being taken over by corporations that are putting profits ahead of the well being of inmates and these corporations really be trusted with ownership of our comments. and we begin tonight with a struggle between billionaires and working class americans so last month forbes magazine released their annual list of the four hundred wealthiest americans no surprise who's on the top of the list bill gates you've probably heard of him he's followed by warren buffett who as we all know despite being worth forty six billion dollars pays a lower tax rate than his secretary buffett pays that special capital gains tax rate that mitt romney and a lot of other rich americans pay who make money with money rather than with their

hands or brains like the rest of us next up is larry ellison he's the c.e.o. of oracle he's worth forty one billion dollars and he just recently bought ninety eight percent of the hawaiian island of la not. so times are good for larry and ready have the top five are two men who really need no introduction but i'll give them one anyway charles and david koch and we all know about their exploits so tonight we'll give the cokes. night off and said i want to focus on who's just outside the top five on the forbes richest americans list these people occupying slot six through nine you'll notice they all have the same last name walton they are the wall and there's there are six of them and together they're worth more than one hundred billion dollars no that's not an outrageous ransom being demanded by dr evil that's their actual combined well more than one hundred billion dollars

they're worth more than forty percent of the nation combined in together they control the wal-mart empire and are the biggest private employers in the world not arkansas about america the largest private employers in the world and today the waltons have a little problem on their hands their employees are getting fed up with being treated like crap and being paid just enough to live a not so comfortable working poor lifestyle so yesterday for the second time in a week those employees went on strike this all started last thursday when about sixty workers walked off the job to protest outside nine stores in southern california that on tuesday this strike spread to a dozen cities across the nation from dallas to seattle chicago to washington d.c. los angeles to miami and employees of the release of the retail giant stage the first ever strike against the company and its history. see wal-mart workers do not belong to a union but the walk outs were planned by

a group called our wal-mart it's an organization of workers backed by the united food and commercial workers union the organization is giving a voice to workers to protest against what they say are the company's attempts to quote silence and retaliate against workers for speaking out for improvements on the job they also want better staffing at stores and better benefits currently the average pay of a wal-mart employee is eight dollars an eighty four cents an hour one of the walmart airs jim walton is worth nearly twenty seven billion dollars alone. so to cumulate that much wealth an average wal-mart employee would have to work more than three billion hours that's not including any tax withholdings or if they were working say forty hours a week then they'd have to work more than seventy six million weeks or about one and a half million years if you want to see the staggering levels of wealth inequality

in america there's no better place to look than i wal mart so if you're wal-mart worker you can either get to work for the next one and a half million years to try and live up to the american dream standards set by the walton family or you can get to the streets and demand economic justice well a growing number of workers are now choosing the streets which might have a huge impact on a very important shopping day just around the corner. josh eidelson joins me now he's a labor journalist and contributing writer to so long and in these times josh welcome back to the show thanks for having me seemed so you got an article up today kind of updating on what's going on around wal-mart and the workers there are hinting that there could be mass action on black friday if wal-mart doesn't give in to demands to stop retaliating against workers what is the realistic possibility of black friday being hijacked by you know striking workers. well given wal-mart's history

given the intensity with which warmer it has fought organizing attempts before the fact that the shutdown of the entire store in canada after workers couldn't organize the way that wal-mart has withstood other campaigns in the past though never strikes like this i don't think there's any reason to be too optimistic about a resolution coming soon so i think if you're a black friday shopper there's every reason to expect that the workers will follow through on their threat now when i ask for work spokesperson about this today it was a little more cory he said he wasn't going to speculate and when asked about whether they would meet any of our wal-mart's demands about rescinding firings of workers that the workers say were in retaliation all he said was that if someone brought an example in retaliation that they would look into it and so on but of course what works if they don't retaliate they deny the dozens of charges that have been brought by workers and by our wal-mart their workers have been punished or lost

their jobs because they stood up and tried to organize or spoke up about conditions that work so i think we should brace for something significant on black friday this is just a coincidence that wal-mart has managed for fifty years to not have any unions operate in i mean throughout history of progressive change has been fueled by a wave or movements massive general strikes. doesn't say much if something were to happen on black friday that would have a massive effect on you know the political landscape in america. i think it would be massive i think already we've seen from eight shrimp workers in louisiana seventy workers in wal-mart's warehouses now two and sixty wal-mart store workers then these workers are taking inspiration from each other they may speak different languages and do different in different parts of the country but they've seen a common enemy in wal-mart and of course the common enemy is bigger than that the walton family for example are also huge funder it's of the movement to privatized

public education so yes if we see wal-mart in the belly of the beast the company that everyone has seen is non-unionized you know organize and pull the company that you can't beat we see workers continue to defy it continue to get bigger rather than shrinking then that's going to send a signal all over the place so we have just a little less than a minute left the started with the warehouse workers a few weeks ago then last week that started with retail workers picked up on tuesday there's talks of something happening but how do we get to where we are now to something happening at the end of the month what's the process there well i think the number to keep in mind is there are thousands of people who are dues paying members of our wal-mart there are one hundred sixty of them so far going out on strike now what are wal-mart says is that those workers are all leaders who will go back to work and inspire other people only they can know only those hundred sixty people and some of the organizers working with them know how deep their

relationships are how far it is from that here to the next tier of workers and that's the big question for the next month we may not see a lot of public action the question each of those people how many coworkers can they convince to do what they did there will says josh eidelson to help the great reporting and we'll keep an eye on this thanks a lot thanks a lot in this struggle between working class americans and billionaires we know which side mitt romney is on after all he's most likely a billionaire himself and has played an active role over the last few decades in accelerating the wal-mart a zation of america times. you need to know this you member what the american dream used to me i do used to mean working hard keeping your nose clean getting enough of a paycheck so you could raise a family meet all the basic essential as you need be able to take a vacation every now and then and afford a real quality retirement and if you wanted to be really successful to climb to the highest rungs of the american dream used to mean coming up with an idea to start

a small business or there was a local shoe store or an appliance shop or repair store a used to mean hiring local members of your community to build up that business and eventually passing that business on to your kids remember the main streets in cities across america before reagan they all looked completely different full of their own unique shops and teak all employ local workers making good paychecks so that they could spend money at other local stores and keep the local economies thriving that used to be the core of the essential part of the american dream and then something happened that something was reaganomics and specifically changes to our antitrust laws and our tax code that opened the way for corporate predators like bain capital bag a way to transnational corporations that devoured local shops on main street by undercutting them with cheap labor a broad tax loopholes massive government subsidies look around main streets across

america today they all look exactly the same i have their wal-mart's their best buys their mcdonald's i mean you name the chain they're there you know the wall is those local businesses from yesterday they're gone as good paychecks that recycled wealth within and throughout the local economy gone. and then came the leveraged buyout artists and the hostile takeover hostlers who eventually got so much bad press in the early eighties after reagan legalized what they did that they changed their industries name to private equity it was the opening for corporate predators who created a new business model where and billions of dollars were made simply by harvesting local companies sucking all the well thought of them and then discarding their bones or selling them for scrap. here's one of those predators explaining how it's done back when he was just getting out of the business in one thousand nine hundred

eighty five. bain capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully five to eight years later to harvest them at a significant profit. harvest them for a significant profit. he just said that harvesting is usually a term reserved for farmers you know like you're ripping the crops out of the ground or moving the grain of the fruit of value and then like bain did with our middle class workers in our factories throwing everything else away or burning in the fields it's a term used to describe inhumane third world regimes that harvest oregon human organs is a term used to describe the plotlines of movies where aliens harvest humans and it's a term mitt romney used to describe what he would do to local businesses he's not a job creator he's a prophet harvester and today all that money he's made to harvest in the money in

what were once our local companies is being used to finance his run for the white house to become the harvester in chief. coming up with twenty seven days left until the election millionaires and billionaires are continuing to flood our democracy with corporate cash how much will they spend before it's all over and where does that leave the people in the democratic. here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that many americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot like you sir are a fool you know what kind of my carousel is but i don't want to give us a defeat terrorism a liberal and the christian public. can secure the beliefs of others because it's going to suffer to distract us from what you and i should care about because

they're a profit driven industry that sells a sensationalistic garbage he calls it breaking news i'm happy martin and we're going to break that. you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom hardy welcome to the big picture.

the first. debate over money and politics one state keeps popping up again and again. montana it's one of the least populated states in the nation but it's a state that really cares about maintaining the integrity of its elections it goes back literally one hundred years when the state government was completely corrupted by mining barons and copper kings who spent huge amounts of money buying state politicians to do their bit so the people of montana came together in one thousand and twelve to say enough is enough and they passed a law that banned any sort of corporate spending on elections within the state. and

that last stood for about a century it stood for about a century until the supreme court ruled in citizens united that corporations millionaires billionaires and anyone else can spend unlimited amounts in federal elections including those elections in montana and this year in a five to four ruling on the supreme court five conservative justices who have nothing to do with montana basically told the state that they have to abide by their ruling and open their elections up once again to the mining barons and copper kings to see what montana is afraid of is what the rest of the nation should be scared to death of and that's our election being bought and the one who's been watching t.v. the last few months has seen their fair share of political ads financed by outside spending groups like super pacs and dark money organizations that don't have to reveal their donors and if you're starting to get annoyed by all of these ads well here's some bad news for you it's about to get a lot worse a new report by open secrets reveals that these nonparty affiliated groups have

spent more than a half billion dollars this election cycle more than the total amount of money spent by nonparty groups in every election since one thousand nine hundred ninety combined and take a look at this chart the red shows historical outside spending prior to october sixth the green shows historical outside spending after october six noticed how in previous elections a majority of outside spending actually occurred after october six so that means that huge bar representing two thousand and twelve that eclipses all the other years is about to be topped off with a lot of green which will likely take it off the chart well into the billions of dollars in other words when it comes outside spending you ain't seen nothing yet and most of that money is not being used in the presidential election it's being used in congressional and state races where it doesn't take much money to sway an election in the media markets are a heck of a lot cheaper you know in places like. montana so how exactly are organized people

supposed to fight back against this will here for an answer is senior fellow at the center for responsive politics public on the show good to be here so we've seen about a half billion dollars spent so far how how high is this going to get there's really no way to know one of the things that changed with citizens united is the ability to bring lots of money to the table on any given day as long as you've got capital you can make it work and in politics this year and so we don't know how much of it is clearly going to probably be above a billion dollars certainly we expected to be around a billion yeah one of the differences you see from that chart you can see that about half the money usually gets spent after this time but this year's been pretty unusual they started spending at a general election pace really in about may of this year so these poor people in colorado and ohio and other battleground states have been barraged for a very long time we'll see especially now that the media has turned it into a horse race again in. a debate that all encourage

a lot more wealthy people to have another investment in mitt romney moving forward now that looks like he might be able to win so i'm wondering what i mean we'll watch t.v. and you'll see maybe one political ad sometimes you'll see him back to back what will. we get to a billion dollars well that look like will just be all are commercial breaks filled with political advertising and isn't that what the media companies want when it comes down to it it's certainly what their local broadcast stations want one of the things we'll see are auctions for time the price of time is negotiable and especially for what's called non-printable time you know i'm guaranteed that spot on that station and in that show in order to get that you have to pay for it and they're bidding up the prices every day it's much more expensive to run ads this year as ever before talking about where this money is being spent you guys point out that it's not all being spent in the presidential election that a lot of it is being funneled into congressional elections and even local state elections. so when we're trying to judge the impact of citizens united is going to

have. well this election we can't really look at the presidential election as much where we should be looking at which way the senate maybe not the senate but especially the house and state legislatures are going to go right sure because both of the chambers in the congress are in play this year either one could switch from from party control it's going to be very important a small set of races in the house and also in the senate are going to be critical to what happens down the road in the presidential campaign you're right both of these candidates are going to have plenty of money nobody's going to lose this presidential election because they didn't have enough money to spend. in house races around the country sometimes in surprising places where we don't expect a real serious challenge if some outside group comes in with a million two million five million dollars which isn't very much in the presidential context but they could dominate the airwaves they could control the message in a small jurisdiction like that yeah i mean two weeks out of you know florida second district or something because someone comes in and drops a million and a half dollars that that's came over with it and what it's done is it's raised the stakes for everybody it's caused

a fundraising frenzy for candidates themselves because they're afraid that the even even somebody who wants to try to help you might come and help you with a message that doesn't really work for the voters in your district and so every candidate is nervous about what might happen. these interest or you have to spend money they just now have the threat of spending money they can say well you know if you want to vote a certain way well then i have five million dollars i can funnel to your opponent and just threaten to funnel money to their opponent in the guide to vote any way you want to it's certainly possible that that could happen the flip sides also possibly you know the members of congress are the ones who have a lot of leverage and they can sit down and say you know i can help you and should be should be interesting times and let's hope that this election which is just going to be a freak show election compared to all the other elections raises some awareness and talk about the anthony kennedy was like oh you know money in politics doesn't doesn't you know give rise to corruption and thanks a lot for coming off of the good work that thanks very much. this all comes down to organize people versus organized money. here's tom giving his take. here

graduations to sheldon adelson the caliph and the casino mogul who's made a fortune in china and is now the record holder for the most money spent in an election here in the united states at least that we know about according to politico adelson has funded seventy million dollars of the republican party so far this election more than tripoli in the previous record of campaign spending by any single individual and while adelson hasn't shied away from the spotlight and is in fact proud of his attempts to buy the election for mitt romney there are a lot of other right wing millionaires and billionaires in the shadows who are also spending huge amounts of money that we don't know about you won't hear their names you won't see their faces but they're sure to have a profound effect in november if not on the white house than on the congressional and senate races across the nation and we can thank the supreme court citizens united decision in two thousand and ten for making it all possible. according to

a new report by the sunlight foundation more than three quarters of the four hundred sixty five million dollars in outside spending so far this election would have been a crime which people could go to prison for before five right wingers on the supreme court in their lopsided five before citizens united decision decided the billionaires and corporations including corporations that make their money in other countries should be able to buy american elections super pacs those political creatures spawned by the supreme court's by before decision have dished out two hundred seventy two million dollars so far on this year's election and trade organizations and nonprofits according to citizens united don't have to disclose their donors as founder of the ninety three million so far that we know about the forces of organized money are messing around there are mean up and they're hell bent on winning this election for the billionaire class and their transnational corporations and the only thing standing in their way with a month and

a half to go until the election is you and me we the people it's organized money versus organized people now i know it sounds daunting how are average working people supposed to compete with the corporate elite willing to spend billions of dollars to defeat progressives across america not only that the first two major elections and citizens united organize one money one easily beating people organized back in two thousand and ten midterms and then winning again in the wisconsin recall election earlier this year make no doubt about it the cards are stacked against us but now is not the time to despair now is the time to get active that's because organized people just secured a significant victory not here in the united states yet but just north in canada and we can learn a lot from how they want. since last year students in quebec have been taking to the streets to hold massive rallies against proposed college tuition hikes the

government of tried to squash the demonstrations of passing emergency laws known as bill seventy eight that would have restricted protests on campuses and outlawed any demonstrations by more than fifty people who didn't have proper permits erode and backing down more students went into the streets they had a clear goal and message they weren't leaving the streets until the tuition hikes were reversed the protest went global and took on the name of the maple spring in the students won. last week with rex incoming from here and now she is canceling plans for the proposed two issue hikes the incoming government will also repeal bill seventy eight a law that would have criminalized the protests president of quebec's largest student union martine deja dean claimed total the victory after the announcement and went on to say quote together we've written a chapter in the history of quebec it's a triumph of justice and equality the journalist and author naomi klein weighed in

on it too tweeting this is why radical movements are mercilessly mocked they can win and it's official quebec tuition hikes are history as gandhi perhaps apocryphally said first they ignore you then they ridicule you then they fight you then you win that's the power of nonviolent mass movements that's the power of organized people which brings us back to the united states organize money is in control there's no control that is no question about it our government our media our economy we've all been hijacked by the corporate elite but i still believe electoral solutions are possible because i still believe that organized people can prevail as they always have often against what seem like impossible odds on the battlefield of american democracy. but that's only if we join together and get organized in the streets on the web and in a way that the media can't ignore that's only if we pick up where occupy left off

moving people forward with a focus message let's face it politicians are out leaders their followers they follow the money now the most conspicuous example is how the republicans followers show sheldon adelson and the cokes and how mitt romney refuses to reveal who's funding his campaign but the trick is to make them follow the people again make that an able to ignore our demands and the only way to do that is to do it students in quebec to get out of the streets on the web and in the media including engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience it is after all the american way and it's brought us everything from abolition to women's suffrage to civil rights we might not win this election but if we can start pulling tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of million people into the streets and then i guarantee politicians will take notice and some of them will run in front of that mass movement and lift the flag of the movement and say this is mine these are the people i am representing in

government that's the way organized people defeat organized money that's not only how it happens in the civil rights movement here in america it's also a half how it happened interest in egypt and it will happen again here in the united states once again if we just stay organized and act. if.

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.